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The thing that annoys me most about this situation is people complaining about how long it took to send out the "Sorry, there was no missile" message. Just as I

The thing that annoys me most about this situation is people complaining about how long it took to send out the "Sorry, there was no missile" message. Just as I expected these were hard-coded messages that were sent out by a button (link) click and not a free-form text area. There are many (good) reasons you want your program set up this way (let's ignore the rest of the terrible UI/UX for now). It makes complete sense to me that given a spec of "make a button send this specific text" you would end up with this. So it's very easy to send the initial message but sending a custom follow up requires contacting someone with access to the underlying system who can send a custom message. In the same way that I may give internal users the ability to fire off SPECIFIC (maybe with placeholders) push notifications with the press of a button but not custom messages. Sure my underlying infrastructure can handle custom messages but the UI for such a feature does not exist (or at least is not available to the person who might have the ability to send preset messages). All in all this was terrible for the people in Hawaii, no doubt. That said I WANT my missile alert system to be easy to activate to give people the most time I can to prepare. The best fix for this (yes a new UI/UX would be best but let's be realistic on how much time/energy they are willing to spend on this) would be a scary looking alert confirmation dialog of "Are you sure you want to send this alert to the whole state?" and maybe have to type a confirmation string.

ceejayoz 9y ago
It'd be nice to have a nice big divider between "live" and "test" messages, and different colors for the two. Small tweaks would go a long way here.
- joshstrange 9y ago
  100% Agree, there are a million little things that could have been done differently/better. My point really was trying to focus on that the delay in follow-up was completely understandable (also unfortunate) and that there was definitely some low hanging fruit for improvement (your suggestions being chief among them). This is, however, the UI/UX use end up with when you produce a specific spec and farm it out to the lowest bidder.
  - jandrese 9y ago
    According to the Twitter thread the option at the bottom of the list (False Alarm) was added as the fix to this problem. Making a reasonable UI was apparently not an option.
    - ceejayoz 9y ago
      Who says it's not an option? There's likely a CMS of some sort for adding messages, so adding a false alarm one probably just meant someone with admin access just needed to fill out a web form. UI changes, even simple ones, would take a little longer.
- duckwheat 9y ago
  Agreed - there really is no excuse, development-wise, for the UI being this poorly designed. 30 minutes of easy work could take this to a point where it would be unlikely somebody would make a mistake.
ghaff 9y ago
>maybe have to type a confirmation string Having to type out YES or some phrase is a fairly common "Are you really sure you want to do this??" sort of thing. I gather they're also looking at requiring a second person's confirmation which, if practical and very unlikely to make it impossible to send any message, seems reasonable as well.
- Pulcinella 9y ago
  I think I have read some research in healthcare field that such confirmations aren’t s helpful as you would think. One reason of course is a combination of alarm fatigue and the fact that software has trained people to just always click yes when an annoying pop up appears. Another is that people will think the have already clicked the correct thing button. So it’s less “Oh a confirmation box has appeared, let me confirm that I pressed the correct button” and more “stupid computer, of course I clicked the right button, that’s what I want to do!” without realizing they did in fact accidentally click the wrong button.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    That's fair. Typing something out helps somewhat with the confirmation reflex problem. (Essentially hitting OK or typing Y as almost a single motion with the original selection.) But you're right that, if you think you've selected the right thing especially in a high pressure situation under time pressure, you may well not read through the warning but just take whatever action is required to confirm.
  - christophilus 9y ago
    Having to type "YES" or "ALERT" would be useless, I agree. But having to type: "SEND A REAL ALERT" or something like that would probably be reasonably useful. The way GitHub prompts me before deleting a repo is a good example of a useful prompt. The text I have to type is the name of the repo being deleted.
- joshstrange 9y ago
  More like when you delete/rename a github repo and they make you type our the repo name. I'm thinking of having to type something like "MISSILE INCOMING SEND ALERT" or similar.
ourmandave 9y ago
...would be a scary looking alert confirmation dialog If I had a bitcoin for every time someone clicked through the confirm dialog without looking...
- astura 9y ago
  I don't recall the source, so I'm not sure of the accuracy, but I read that this is what happened, the employee clicked through the confirmation screen.
  - gus_massa 9y ago
    Does the "drill" link also have a confirmation screen? Do the two confirmation screen look equal or they are different? If they are equal (for example a generic message like "Are you sure?") then it's almost like no confirmation, because people get trained to click it automatically. I think that ideally each one must have a "nice" image about the alarm, that is very different from the other images. Another possibility is to force the user to retype the message, so the user must read and understand the actual message to be send. (Remember to disallow cut and paste.) (Allow a small number of typos, perhaps a Levenshtein distance of 4 or 5, because the user will be probably nervous if there are some incoming missiles.)
  - elboru 9y ago
    Maybe the drill message link also had a confirmation screen, so the one he really needed to pay attention to was ignored.
- jonlucc 9y ago
  I'd suggest it only go on the dire warnings; don't have a confirmation on the drill alerts, but yeah, it's not a perfect fix.
  - joshstrange 9y ago
    Something that comes to mind is Skyrim's legendary skill confirmation. When you go to reset a skill it prompts you twice if you really want to do it and the second confirmation has the yes/no switched and the default on no so if you are just clicking through it's easy to not reset the skill. You have to read and know what you are doing. But also, yes, the drill shouldn't prompt so it stands out when it does prompt.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
maxerickson 9y ago
That's an interesting thing to be annoyed about given that a faster way to send out the false alarm notification is one of the mitigations they have put in place.
- joshstrange 9y ago
  No, I'm annoyed that people seem to think people sat around doing jack shit for some 30+ minutes instead of sending out the false alarm message. I'm confident they were going as fast as they can and I don't like the blaming of the operator for what was a failing in the designed software. I'm not even sure I blame the people that wrote the software as I'm sure they were given a very specific spec of what it should do and they met the spec.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Right, but they are complaining about the whole system failing. So even if the spec is where the "false alarm" button was omitted, it's still a reasonable complaint that the system was designed without it.
JdeBP 9y ago
The claim at https://twitter.com/discreetsecure/status/953226818357727233 https://twitter.com/discreetsecure/status/953226818357727233 is that there already is a confirmation dialogue. It is the same for every option, and it does not mention which option has been chosen.
- jandrese 9y ago
  That's useless then. That's the sort of dialog that trains users to ignore it because it offers no useful information. There's a post just a short distance down that twitter thread to a simple layout change that would have made it difficult to choose the wrong option by simply categorizing the options properly. But I'm betting that list is autogenerated on a hardcoded template from some goddamn database somewhere in this enterprise app that makes a simple layout change like that a nightmare to implement.
  - JdeBP 9y ago
    Yes. Luca Milan's, mentioned here at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16158252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16158252 . Compare M. Milan's design to the mainframe menu screens I have listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16158878 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16158878 .
    - epicide 9y ago
      There is nothing about ncurses that prevents you from implementing the same crappy interface they have.
- bsder 9y ago
  Sadly, that IS important. When someone is in a crisis situation, their actions have to be the SAME as a drill. Making someone do or type something different when things are already hectic is likely to send them into brain-lock. The solution is something extra that pops up AFTER doing everything the same that says "Sending real alert in 10 ... 9 ... 8 ..." with a "Type: "Abort" in text field to stop". If the operator brain freezes whether real or fake, the alert still goes out in 10 seconds. If the operator screwed up but doesn't brain-freeze, he can stop the situation. That's pretty much the best you can do if you're trying to make your drill and your alarm almost identical in order to maximize crisis performance.
mannykannot 9y ago
You are more concerned about what you see as inappropriate criticism of one aspect of this UI design than you are by anything else in this debacle? I hope you will be able to broaden your horizon, if only because narrow perspectives were probably part of the problem, as they often are.
- joshstrange 9y ago
  Not of the UI, of the response time.
cube00 9y ago
Good thing NPM was up so they could get a new build out with the all clear message.
- softawre 9y ago
  underrated comment
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  Dollars to donuts this garbage is Java all the way down.
dictum 9y ago
> The best fix for this (yes a new UI/UX would be best but let's be realistic on how much time/energy they are willing to spend on this) would be a scary looking alert confirmation dialog of "Are you sure you want to send this alert to the whole state?" "Give it a thump with your finger" https://youtu.be/YchEuqYjMi8?t=29 https://youtu.be/YchEuqYjMi8?t=29
vilhelm_s 9y ago
Someone posted a screenshot of a different EAS alert interface on twitter: https://twitter.com/supersat/status/952612571122630659 https://twitter.com/supersat/status/952612571122630659 It has a similar list of alert "templates" as this one, but in addition it has a confirmation box with a radio button "send TEST only / SEND EAS LIVE", and if you select the "send live" option you must enter an authorization code. It would be interesting to see what the rest of the user interface looks like, if the hawaii one has something similar.
- selectodude 9y ago
  The use of Windows XP is a nice touch.
bhk 9y ago
What was stopping them from sending the "This is a drill" message?
- tomjen3 9y ago
  Thinking about it. Also quite possible that the system could only handle so many messages a second. But regardless of excuses it should never take that long to send that message. You are going to have people with PTSD for years over this. I wished the state would be sued by every single person in the state -- I am sure than both the guy who clicked the link and the UI would be gone presto. Probably some sovereign immunity that stops that though.
yread 9y ago
If I was in the operator's place I would probably send all the other messages as well so that people know the system didn't work and don't go commit crimes/suicides thinking the world is gonna end
tomjen3 9y ago
I really don't get all the high levels of excuse in this thread. Think about the victims here: think about putting your (terrified) kid a storm drain. Really think about it, let the feelings about it sink in. The only correct solution is to fire the person involved, as the next guy will look closer. Yeah maybe not fair, but when working with landmines you have to pay attention - and it is politically much more feasible than redesigning the system. However I also object to that system in the first place, since it doesn't matter where you hide if a nuke falls close to you, and you probably don't want to survive.

ceejayoz 9y ago

It'd be nice to have a nice big divider between "live" and "test" messages, and different colors for the two. Small tweaks would go a long way here.

joshstrange 9y ago
100% Agree, there are a million little things that could have been done differently/better. My point really was trying to focus on that the delay in follow-up was completely understandable (also unfortunate) and that there was definitely some low hanging fruit for improvement (your suggestions being chief among them). This is, however, the UI/UX use end up with when you produce a specific spec and farm it out to the lowest bidder.
- jandrese 9y ago
  According to the Twitter thread the option at the bottom of the list (False Alarm) was added as the fix to this problem. Making a reasonable UI was apparently not an option.
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    Who says it's not an option? There's likely a CMS of some sort for adding messages, so adding a false alarm one probably just meant someone with admin access just needed to fill out a web form. UI changes, even simple ones, would take a little longer.
duckwheat 9y ago
Agreed - there really is no excuse, development-wise, for the UI being this poorly designed. 30 minutes of easy work could take this to a point where it would be unlikely somebody would make a mistake.

ghaff 9y ago

>maybe have to type a confirmation string Having to type out YES or some phrase is a fairly common "Are you really sure you want to do this??" sort of thing. I gather they're also looking at requiring a second person's confirmation which, if practical and very unlikely to make it impossible to send any message, seems reasonable as well.

Pulcinella 9y ago
I think I have read some research in healthcare field that such confirmations aren’t s helpful as you would think. One reason of course is a combination of alarm fatigue and the fact that software has trained people to just always click yes when an annoying pop up appears. Another is that people will think the have already clicked the correct thing button. So it’s less “Oh a confirmation box has appeared, let me confirm that I pressed the correct button” and more “stupid computer, of course I clicked the right button, that’s what I want to do!” without realizing they did in fact accidentally click the wrong button.
- ghaff 9y ago
  That's fair. Typing something out helps somewhat with the confirmation reflex problem. (Essentially hitting OK or typing Y as almost a single motion with the original selection.) But you're right that, if you think you've selected the right thing especially in a high pressure situation under time pressure, you may well not read through the warning but just take whatever action is required to confirm.
- christophilus 9y ago
  Having to type "YES" or "ALERT" would be useless, I agree. But having to type: "SEND A REAL ALERT" or something like that would probably be reasonably useful. The way GitHub prompts me before deleting a repo is a good example of a useful prompt. The text I have to type is the name of the repo being deleted.
joshstrange 9y ago
More like when you delete/rename a github repo and they make you type our the repo name. I'm thinking of having to type something like "MISSILE INCOMING SEND ALERT" or similar.

ourmandave 9y ago

...would be a scary looking alert confirmation dialog If I had a bitcoin for every time someone clicked through the confirm dialog without looking...

astura 9y ago
I don't recall the source, so I'm not sure of the accuracy, but I read that this is what happened, the employee clicked through the confirmation screen.
- gus_massa 9y ago
  Does the "drill" link also have a confirmation screen? Do the two confirmation screen look equal or they are different? If they are equal (for example a generic message like "Are you sure?") then it's almost like no confirmation, because people get trained to click it automatically. I think that ideally each one must have a "nice" image about the alarm, that is very different from the other images. Another possibility is to force the user to retype the message, so the user must read and understand the actual message to be send. (Remember to disallow cut and paste.) (Allow a small number of typos, perhaps a Levenshtein distance of 4 or 5, because the user will be probably nervous if there are some incoming missiles.)
- elboru 9y ago
  Maybe the drill message link also had a confirmation screen, so the one he really needed to pay attention to was ignored.
jonlucc 9y ago
I'd suggest it only go on the dire warnings; don't have a confirmation on the drill alerts, but yeah, it's not a perfect fix.
- joshstrange 9y ago
  Something that comes to mind is Skyrim's legendary skill confirmation. When you go to reset a skill it prompts you twice if you really want to do it and the second confirmation has the yes/no switched and the default on no so if you are just clicking through it's easy to not reset the skill. You have to read and know what you are doing. But also, yes, the drill shouldn't prompt so it stands out when it does prompt.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

maxerickson 9y ago

That's an interesting thing to be annoyed about given that a faster way to send out the false alarm notification is one of the mitigations they have put in place.

joshstrange 9y ago
No, I'm annoyed that people seem to think people sat around doing jack shit for some 30+ minutes instead of sending out the false alarm message. I'm confident they were going as fast as they can and I don't like the blaming of the operator for what was a failing in the designed software. I'm not even sure I blame the people that wrote the software as I'm sure they were given a very specific spec of what it should do and they met the spec.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Right, but they are complaining about the whole system failing. So even if the spec is where the "false alarm" button was omitted, it's still a reasonable complaint that the system was designed without it.

JdeBP 9y ago

The claim at https://twitter.com/discreetsecure/status/953226818357727233 https://twitter.com/discreetsecure/status/953226818357727233 is that there already is a confirmation dialogue. It is the same for every option, and it does not mention which option has been chosen.

jandrese 9y ago
That's useless then. That's the sort of dialog that trains users to ignore it because it offers no useful information. There's a post just a short distance down that twitter thread to a simple layout change that would have made it difficult to choose the wrong option by simply categorizing the options properly. But I'm betting that list is autogenerated on a hardcoded template from some goddamn database somewhere in this enterprise app that makes a simple layout change like that a nightmare to implement.
- JdeBP 9y ago
  Yes. Luca Milan's, mentioned here at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16158252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16158252 . Compare M. Milan's design to the mainframe menu screens I have listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16158878 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16158878 .
  - epicide 9y ago
    There is nothing about ncurses that prevents you from implementing the same crappy interface they have.
bsder 9y ago
Sadly, that IS important. When someone is in a crisis situation, their actions have to be the SAME as a drill. Making someone do or type something different when things are already hectic is likely to send them into brain-lock. The solution is something extra that pops up AFTER doing everything the same that says "Sending real alert in 10 ... 9 ... 8 ..." with a "Type: "Abort" in text field to stop". If the operator brain freezes whether real or fake, the alert still goes out in 10 seconds. If the operator screwed up but doesn't brain-freeze, he can stop the situation. That's pretty much the best you can do if you're trying to make your drill and your alarm almost identical in order to maximize crisis performance.

mannykannot 9y ago

You are more concerned about what you see as inappropriate criticism of one aspect of this UI design than you are by anything else in this debacle? I hope you will be able to broaden your horizon, if only because narrow perspectives were probably part of the problem, as they often are.

joshstrange 9y ago
Not of the UI, of the response time.

cube00 9y ago

Good thing NPM was up so they could get a new build out with the all clear message.

softawre 9y ago
underrated comment
kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
Dollars to donuts this garbage is Java all the way down.

dictum 9y ago

> The best fix for this (yes a new UI/UX would be best but let's be realistic on how much time/energy they are willing to spend on this) would be a scary looking alert confirmation dialog of "Are you sure you want to send this alert to the whole state?" "Give it a thump with your finger" https://youtu.be/YchEuqYjMi8?t=29 https://youtu.be/YchEuqYjMi8?t=29

vilhelm_s 9y ago

Someone posted a screenshot of a different EAS alert interface on twitter: https://twitter.com/supersat/status/952612571122630659 https://twitter.com/supersat/status/952612571122630659 It has a similar list of alert "templates" as this one, but in addition it has a confirmation box with a radio button "send TEST only / SEND EAS LIVE", and if you select the "send live" option you must enter an authorization code. It would be interesting to see what the rest of the user interface looks like, if the hawaii one has something similar.

selectodude 9y ago
The use of Windows XP is a nice touch.

bhk 9y ago

What was stopping them from sending the "This is a drill" message?

tomjen3 9y ago
Thinking about it. Also quite possible that the system could only handle so many messages a second. But regardless of excuses it should never take that long to send that message. You are going to have people with PTSD for years over this. I wished the state would be sued by every single person in the state -- I am sure than both the guy who clicked the link and the UI would be gone presto. Probably some sovereign immunity that stops that though.

yread 9y ago

If I was in the operator's place I would probably send all the other messages as well so that people know the system didn't work and don't go commit crimes/suicides thinking the world is gonna end

tomjen3 9y ago

I really don't get all the high levels of excuse in this thread. Think about the victims here: think about putting your (terrified) kid a storm drain. Really think about it, let the feelings about it sink in. The only correct solution is to fire the person involved, as the next guy will look closer. Yeah maybe not fair, but when working with landmines you have to pay attention - and it is politically much more feasible than redesigning the system. However I also object to that system in the first place, since it doesn't matter where you hide if a nuke falls close to you, and you probably don't want to survive.